But Cyrillon went on unheedingly,—­

“Beware of that symbol of your Church, Monsignor!  It is a very strange one!  It seems about to be expanded into a reality of dreadful earnest!  ‘I know not the man,’ said Peter.  Does not the glittering of the world’s wealth piled into the Vatican,—­useless wealth lying idle in the midst of hideous beggary and starvation,—­ proclaim with no uncertain voice, ‘I know not the man’?  The Man of sorrows,—­the Man of tender and pitying heart,—­the Man who could not send the multitude away without bread, and compassed a miracle to give it to them,—­the Man who wept for a friend’s death,—­who took little children in His arms and blessed them,—­who pardoned the unhappy outcast and said, ’Sin no more,’—­who was so selfless, so pure, so strong, so great, that even sceptics, while denying His Divinity, are compelled to own that His life and His actions were more Divine than those of any other creature in human shape that has ever walked the earth!  Monsignor, there is no true representative of Christ in this world!”

“Not for heretics possibly,” said Moretti disdainfully.

“For no one!” said Cyrillon passionately—­“For no poor sinking, seeking soul is there any such visible comforter!  But there is a grand tendency in Mankind to absorb His Spirit and His teaching;—­to turn from forms and shadows of faith to the Faith itself,—­from descriptions of a possible heaven to the real Heaven, which is being disclosed to us in transcendent glimpses through the jewel-gates of science!  There were twelve gates in the visioned heaven of St. John,—­and each gate was composed of one pearl!  Truly do the scoffers say that never did any planetary sea provide such pearls as these!  No,—­for they were but prophetic emblems of the then undiscovered Sciences.  Ah, Monsignor!—­and what of the psychic senses and forces?—­forces which we are just beginning to discover and to use,—­forces which enable me to read your mind at this present moment and to see how willingly you would send me to the burning, Christian as you call yourself, for my thoughts and opinions!—­as your long-ago predecessors did with all men who dared to reason for themselves!  But that time has passed, Monsignor; the Spirit of Christ in the world has conquered the Church there!”

The words rushed from his lips with a fervid eloquence that was absolutely startling,—­his eyes were aglow with feeling—­his face so animated and inspired, that it seemed as though a flame behind it illumined every feature.  Abbe Vergniaud, astonished and overcome, laid a trembling hand on the arm of the passionate speaker with a gesture more of appeal than restraint, and the young man caught that hand within his own and held it fast.  Moretti for a moment fixed his eyes upon father and son with an expression of intense hatred that darkened his face with a deep shadow as of a black mask,—­and then without a word deliberately turned his back upon both.